radical matt
JUB Addict
THANK YOU!!
Good god, I read through 3 pages of this and was worried no one knew their history. At least someone knows what's going on, though the Civil War wasn't simply about states' rights, at least you knew it wasn't just about slavery.
Revisionist history, which is probably what a lot of you were taught, says that the Civil War was fought over slavery. This is actually a grievous error.
The Civil War was the culmination of a long running power struggle between the predominately industrialized North and the agricultural South. The two "halves" of the early United States were allied first in throwing off British rule and then for their continued mutual benefit.
However, as time went on and the nation expanded, it became a struggle between different people with different objectives. Northerners, who ALSO practiced slavery for quite some time after the nation's independence, had taken a larger part of the manufacturing capacity and use of machinery that the Industrial Revolution allowed. Meanwhile, the South, with its more temperate climates, open spaces, and higher proportionality of slave labor had long taken to the fields to produce foods and grains. (Quick history fact: Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, made his invention to harvest cotton faster thinking it would make slaves' lives easier; not to simply increase the amount of cotton nor did he foresee that it would be used to employ more slaves to harvest the more cotton using the gins.)
The power struggle began with the drawing of Congress. Senators (2 from each state) and Congressmen (a set number for each state based on its population) were roughly evenly split, having even numbers from the North and the South. This meant that Congress couldn't do anything that would favor one side at the expense of the other. (For a modern day analogy; suppose Texas, an oil producing state, had the power in Congress to increase oil prices. Would all 49 other states like it if Texas was allowed to force laws through Congress allowing oil prices to go up higher for the benefit of Texas oil men?)
The balance of power was briefly threatened when a new state was added below the Mason-Dixon line (states north of the line were not allowed to be admitted to the Union as slave states. I don't remember quite, but I think it was a decision of Congress that made that law, but I wouldn't mind someone verifying that.) If this state, Missouri, was allowed to achieve full statehood, there would be 2 more Senate seats supporting the South than the North. To prevent this, Massachusetts split into two states; Massachusetts and Maine (previously, Maine and Massachusetts were a single, two-part state just like Michigan is now. Some of you guys may not have known that...) This Missouri Compromise held the balance of power in check for a little while longer.
However, when a state south of the Mason-Dixon line was allowed to be admitted into the Union as a Free state, this worried Southerners. While no state north of that line could become an agricultural state (with slave labor, and at the time, without slave labor, a state couldn't have a competitive agricultural output), states south of the M-D line would be allowed to be free/manufacturing states! Now the balance was threatened again, but with no clear solution.
Lincoln, a northern Republican from the manufacturing state of Illinois, was running for election as President. The South felt that if he was elected, the North controlled Congress with this Northern President would proceed to pass laws that would cause harm to the South while benefiting the North (e.g. allow the North to export manufactured goods while the South was only allowed to trade agricultural goods to the North but no one else, thus losing money and weakening the Southern economy.)
--> Keep in mind, up until this point, slavery is NOT yet the main issue. In fact, it wasn't even a real issue at all.
When Lincoln won the election, the people of the South felt that was the last straw and that they were about to be steamrolled into second class citizens. Again note; slavery is NOT at issue.
Here the United States' Civil War began. Because Lincoln, a Republican from the North, was made President and the balance of power in the Congress was shifted to favor the North. (The South was distrustful of Republicans and preferred the Democrats, who were the party for the southern farmer...how times have changed. I don't suppose any of you can realize that you're exactly the same way now, just the names, stances, and battle lines have shifted...)
--> The war was STILL not about slavery; 5 slave states on the border of the North and the South fought on the side of the Union.
...a ways into the war, Lincoln thought that if the slaves were offered freedom, they might come to the North's aid with intelligence on the enemy's actions and a willingness to fight for the North in the war, which (as a poster above mentioned) the North was not having an easy time winning. And it wouldn't hurt the North since there were no/few slaves in the North.
Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves free.
It should be noted that technically, this may not have been a legal action (a President is not given the authority under the Constitution to make law, nor to seize "property" without due process.)
Now, in addition to States' rights, the balance of power in the Union, and economic issues, the Civil War came to be about slavery too. Since the South had proclaimed its independence, and the war's outcome had not been decided, what Lincoln did would be akin to the President Bush declaring that all Canadians had to surrender their cattle to the United States and were not allowed to own cattle (it's an ugly comparison, but the closest one I can make using a modern day example.) That is, one sovereign nation telling another sovereign nation what it can do with its own things (livestock seems to be the only thing that even remotely is similar to slavery...and slaves were considered a type of livestock at the time in all countries that allowed slavery, the South and the US not being alone in this treatment of them.)
The war dragged on. Many hundreds of thousands of people died. Many brothers, cousins, and so on from both sides of the line.
In the end, a gamble by the North payed off, and one gambit made by the South did not. I don't remember which battle it was, but the Southern commander (Jackson...?) ordered his troops to charge the enemy position which was far more capable of defending than he dreamed. His army was so decimated that it was unable to make any more aggressive actions for the rest of the war, being relegated to trying to keep itself in one piece and run/defend from battles. This loss of manpower is what enabled the Union commander (Grant, I believe) to press for a truce and terms of surrender. In the end, the South realized that this one crushing blow cost them the war, and to prevent further bloodshed, relented.
The South agreed to be returned into the Union.
It's a historical oddity what happened next. Lincoln was actually wanting to give them full rights quickly, and even possibly restore slavery. He wanted to treat them like the prodigal son finally coming home. However, he was assassinated by a plot that still is interesting to historians that study it. After his death, the Congress, not fully controlled by the North, decided to treat the South as a defeated nation, not as wayward brothers. To this end, they enacted all the laws they were prevented from doing before, installed political and governmental leaders in the South (all Northern Republicans), and threatened to break up the South completely.
So harsh was what they did that the South almost had an uprising to start a second Civil War. The North decided to relent some, realizing that a second war this soon would devastate the South, but also the North and the nation as a whole, but even then, it would take several decades for the southern states to reclaim their rights and privileges as states due to the extreme legislation passed by the North.
So the Civil War was, actually, not about slavery. It was about a power struggle and about freedom. Could the people of the South form their own government if they wanted? Would the balance of power between the industrialized, Republican North and the agricultural, Democrat controlled South be maintained?
Many brave young men and women, many not so young yet equally brave, fought in that war, both sides against all odds, for what they believed in. Southerners fought for their freedoms and their homes (the battles were mostly fought in the South, imagine if a civil war started right now and YOUR home was in a city that battles were being fought in, YOUR land and family in danger), their way of life, and their equality. The North fought for the Union, the dream of democracy, the ideal that both parts of this nation should be one and whole.
The Battle Flag of the Confederacy, because the stars and bars was NOT the flag of the Confederate States of America; it was only the battle flag, the flag carried by the guys with the flutes and drums into battles to distinguish friendly troops from enemy ones...this flag is a tribute to the bravery of these people. It is a tribute to the independence of the South, the honor and dignity of the southern gentleman, of the young man fighting for his family, of the father taking arms against his son for the good of his people. It is a symbol for the resolve of the North; what they had to endure to see the unity of the nation restored. It is also a symbol of what we must never do again; let our differences become so polarizing that we cannot reach neutral ground. So opposed so that we balance our representation on the edge of a sword's tip; movement to either side cutting us asunder and bringing us into the fires of war.
But now you would say that the KKK use it.
The Romans used crosses to burn and kill criminals and enemies of the state, yet the Christian church uses it as a symbol of sacrifice and redemption.
The Nazis used the swastika as a symbol of their new order, yet it was adapted from a symbol of love and peace, and after their time, became known as a symbol for hatred and bloodshed.
Symbolatry is powerful; letters that form a word for hate in one language may spell the word love in another. It rallies men to do great deeds or plunges them into the depths of despair. But the power of any symbol is up to the person who holds it and sees it.
To the OP; this flag means slavery and oppression.
To the people that put it in their houses, it means a symbol of glory and honor.
To the South, it meant freedom and independence.
Who is right?
Well, in the end, it's all in the eye of the beholder (vicious, malevolent creatures, those...), but that's the power that the symbol has. The symbol itself simply means what the person who uses it wants it to mean.
The people that wave this flag do not do so for slavery. The KKK are...unwise and without a farther reaching compassion that they should probably have. But even they don't use it as a symbol for slaver. (I don't know much about their views or what they believe now, but were I to guess, it would be a symbol of unshakable resolve and the power/rights of white people in their eyes.) And the South certainly didn't have such a meaning attached to it.
Heck, the Confederacy itself was not concerned with slavery. They simply felt that they would not have representation in the government and would be brow-beaten by the North and so did the same thing that the 13 colonies did to England; declared themselves independent.
Slavery wasn't at issue, nor was a religious intent of some kind (the sci-fi and alternate history stories that have stuff like the "Religious States of America" or the "Cristian Republic of Texas" always amuse me in their stupidity...) I'm not QUITE sure why revisionist historians feel that the Civil War should be made about slavery, especially since there are many important things that we can learn from it that apply to the present day...for example, how the US is becoming polarized today between the two parties and various groups that are vying for power bares some resemblance to the power struggles that led to the Civil War. To dismiss it as simply a "war for slavery", in addition to ignoring history itself, also relegates it to a forgotten era and keeps people from learning the lessons of history.
...lessons that, if not learned, we are destined to repeat...
-sigh-
Sorry about that, guys. I'm sure most of you already knew all this, I was just...a little annoyed by the time I got to this point and felt it my duty to educate people on history. ^_^ I suppose I should leave it to the history majors and get back to the science and economic labs, eh? But I guess it comes with being a jack of all trades...
